The Great Recession ravaged many of America’s normal behavior patterns - including business startups. In fact, according to a new study from Forrester Consulting, commissioned by security giant Symantec, the recession changed startup entrepreneurs themselves.

Necessity Is the Mother of Invention

The survey found that the “leaders of small businesses launched during the Great Recession are dramatically different than those who launched their company prior to 2008.” The report calls these new business owners “accidental entrepreneurs” and defines the term as a “company founder who started his or her small businesses out of pure necessity rather than a lifelong dream of ‘being their own boss.’”

The National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship (NACIE) supports President Obama’s innovation strategy by helping to develop policies that foster entrepreneurship and identifying new ways to take great ideas from the lab to the marketplace to drive economic growth and create jobs.

One of the guiding forces of NACIE is its co-chair, Dr. Desh Deshpande, who is also Chairman and President of the Sparta Group and has been involved with many other companies, such as A123 Systems, Sycamore Networks, Tejas Networks, Sandstone Capital, and HiveFire. He is also the founder of the Deshpande Foundation, and creator and supporter of the Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which is a leading proof of concept center.

The European Commission is to set up a new Web Entrepreneurs Partnership as part of an offensive to catch up with the US on technology innovation, according to the EU's Commissioner for the Digital Agenda, Neelie Kroes.

The announcement came in a message delivered by Kroes’s adviser Constantijn van Oranje-Nassau at the ‘UNconvention’ staged by the European Young Innovators Forum (EYIF) in Brussels last week.

“Over in the US, start-ups create three million jobs per year – even during a recession,” she said in the relayed statement, calling for more recognition for entrepreneurs, better resources, and “the right rules”.

The United States may be home to Facebook, Google, Apple, and taco shells made of Doritos, but according to a recent international study, our nation is becoming less innovative, at least compared to last year. After ranking 7th in 2011, the U.S. is ranked 10th in this year's Global Innovation Index, a massive report published by Insead, an international business school, and the World Intellectual Property Organization, an agency of the United Nations.

The report ranks 141 nations on nearly 100 factors related to innovation, in areas like "Business sophistication," "Human capital & research," and "Knowledge & technology outputs." Switzerland and Sweden are ranked Nos. 1 and 2, respectively, for the second straight year. Rounding out the top five are Singapore, Finland, and the United Kingdom.

Not everyone is cut out to be an entrepreneur. Kirchner Private Capital Group http://www.kirchnerpcg.com/ came out with a small book that pokes fun at the telltale signs. Here are my favorites:

1. “If two steps forward, one step back is a great day.” Being an entrepreneur is not a straight path. It has its daily ups and downs and ins and out.

Last year when I was heavily pregnant, my husband took me to a gala dinner his company was throwing at the Ritz Carlton hotel in Washington, DC. I could not have been more excited.

You see, for the past two years, Shayan and his partners had worked tirelessly trying to get their startup company, a service which tracked teens' digital activities and sent concerned parents alerts, off the ground.

What can you do to advance your innovation career in times like this? Let me present some ideas and hopefully you can add more advice on this in the following discussion.

• Align With Executives. You need to have a better alignment between the innovation strategy and the overall corporate strategy. One way to do this is to make an extra effort of understanding what matters most for the executives right now and deliver on this.

• See What Comes Next. Once you deliver what the executives would like to see right now, you still have to be able to see what comes next and make sure that your company moves in that direction. The small wins gained by aligning with the executives hopefully make them more attentive to your suggestions on how to develop strategies on what comes next.

Investment follows innovation follows investment.

Regardless of which comes first, we need both.

Innovation can seem a daunting task. Yet, contrary to popular thought, it should start and end with ignoring what the competition is doing. Innovation is easy; just stop "best practices."

How about an airline with open seating and funny flight attendants?

How about guaranteed overnight delivery of anything anywhere in the world?

What about a condiment bottle that's upside down?

What about a muscle relief in a patch?

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The “i360accelerator” is a 60-day idea acceleration and seed funding programme that aims to offer participants the opportunity to work on and refine a startup idea, while receiving training on entrepreneurship and innovation.

Kamal Hassan, founder and CEO of Innovation 360 Consultancy, said, “The region is in need of an entrepreneurial ecosystem to help guide startups and SMEs to become successful businesses whose offerings contribute to economic diversification and benefit society. Our goal is to make the accelerator one part of a comprehensive framework that furthers the entrepreneurial ecosystem.”

The top startup accelerators in the world - programs like TechStars and Y Combinator - receive a couple thousand applications for just a handful of spots each session. It’s harder to get into one than Harvard or Stanford. So how do you do it?

You could Google “how to get into a top accelerator” and see what advice you find. Or, better, you could pick the brain of a recent graduate. Trouble is, those guys are busy trying to grow their companies. They don’t have a lot of time to sit down for a chat.

People who can’t manage their own lives don’t make good entrepreneurs. Small businesses require multi-tasking, work prioritization, and decision-making, with no entourage of assistants and specialists. That’s why Fortune 500 executives usually don’t survive as startup CEOs.

First you have to learn to accept total responsibility for things that happen to your business, just like you are responsible for everything in your personal life. Maybe you are comfortable with having a spouse in control of your personal life, but couples running a business are high risk.

Within effective management there are many important skills, areas of knowledge and theoretical understandings needed. In today’s article, we will consider three basic elements of management.

At work and at home, we carry out management responsibilities on a daily basis, some of which we often complete without much thought. It certainly is not productive or effective to over-think how we manage, yet good management is about being clear, focused and intentional with all of our management initiatives and actions. Let’s explore three key elements of management:

I have grown exceedingly weary of the relentless churn of doomsday articles targeted at RIM. Most analysis articles are merely sports commentary disguised as opinion. Foghorning RIM’s demise is as mainstream as it comes. Yes, the company is bleeding. Axiomatically so by means of RIM’s latest earnings results, but it’s only over when RIM says it’s over.

Everyone has their opinions (motives). Traders heap on the gloom in the hopes of snapping up stock at rock bottom prices and reaping the benefits of buyout premiums should the axe drop.

Q: Everything I read about this "starting a business" stuff is so peachy. But it seems pretty hard to me. So what do they not tell you that I should know before I jump in? — Paige

A: Well, I guess you can count me in as one of those pundits who tends to paint a fairly rosy picture of entrepreneurship. Guilty as charged. I do so because I truly believe it is the right answer for a lot of people who are not happy at work, and for others who might be but could still be more fulfilled, happier, and make more money working for themselves.

Colleges are starting to become startup incubators by offering a variety of classes and programs in order to help students pursue their entrepreneurial ambitions. This is good news for students because employers feel that they should gain entrepreneurship experience before graduating. Many professors are current or former entrepreneurs who act as mentors to students and teach them critical marketing, sales, and operation skills. The Kaufman Foundation estimates that more than 2,000 colleges and universities in the US, two thirds of the total, offer a course in entrepreneurship. There are now approximately 5,000 courses on entrepreneurship, up from 250 back in 1985. There are a few famous college dropouts, including Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, that didn’t need a business curriculum to start their companies, and a few lucky students who were selected as part of Peter Thiel’s “Thiel Fellowship” program, but they are outliers. Zuckerberg was in the right place at the right time and most students don’t get into Thiel’s program. Many students could use the education, network and support of an entrepreneurial institution.

When is a prototype good enough?

Q: My partner and I are working on developing a beta version of our app. He says since it’s functional, we should release it to our beta testers. I say we need to make it much better before we let anyone see it, so that people are wowed and don’t get a bad first impression. What’s your take on this?

Elana Fine: Early users know that this is in early stages — but they can provide you very valuable feedback. That is really the purpose of a beta test. Many local start-ups have been extremely successful in launching companies following Lean Startup principles — get your minimally viable product out there and then get feedback early and iterate.

The panel discusses whether Columbus will be the next Silicone Valley or not.

At least once a week I am approached by a struggling entrepreneur and asked how I market my services. More often than not, I blurt out any number of MBA-like platitudes.

But when I really stop and think about it, my answer morphs into something much deeper: "I treat my clients like God."

Yup. That's my marketing plan. Plain and simple. I treat my clients like God.

Aldea Pharmaceuticals, a biotechnology startup developing an emergency treatment for alcohol poisoning, seemed like an attractive investment to venture capitalist David Coats. But he didn't rely on a hunch—he consulted the computer model he'd built.

Two weeks and a few phone calls later, he cut the company, which is based in Westport, Connecticut, a $1.25 million check. "A decision like that would have normally taken a minimum of three months," says Tim Shannon, a partner with Canaan Partners, the firm that had led Aldea's $7 million fund-raising round.